MLB

“DDN’s 40-gig connectivity provides a massive archive advantage as it means we’ll be able to move ever-increasing amounts of footage in and out of the system to meet our operational and business needs while ensuring the superior experience viewers count on us to provide.”

—Tab Butler, Senior Director of Media and Post Production

As a producer of high definition Major League Baseball video content, MLB Network is recognized as a leader in sports video asset management. MLB Network captures and catalogues multi-petabytes of digital information each year and could have as much as 11 hours of content for every game—which quickly adds up to about 7,000 hours of new content each week. Instant access to that content is vital to their operation.

In 2015, the National Hockey League entered into a media rights partnership with MLB Advanced Media, and NHL Network’s operations were shifted to the same facilities as MLB Network in Secaucus, New Jersey. By 2016, the archive was growing by approximately 125,000 hours of new content per year, and as they continued to collect data, performance bottlenecks occurred within its tape storage archive.

The immediate challenge was moving LTO-4 content into a disk cache and then rewriting that content onto T10KD tapes, while simultaneously recording and archiving new footage onto the T10KD platform. To complicate the issue even further, they needed to ensure that post-production producers and editors had the fastest possible access to video content in their asset management system, encompassing as many as 15 games on any given day. Learn how MLB partnered with DDN to address these challenges with DDN’s MEDIAScaler® storage solution, which offers concurrent access to content while accelerating end-to-end digital content management in a single solution that can scale up to hundreds of petabytes.

CHALLENGES

Needed to accelerate access to vast baseball video archive

Required high-performance disk cache to support tape migration for archive while accommodating 7,000 hours of new content ingested weekly

Needed simplification of complex, concurrent workflows to ensure seamless support for up to 40 concurrent post-production jobs

Needed technology that could suit the needs of two sports TV networks

SOLUTION

DDN’s MEDIAScaler Converged Media Storage

RESULTS

All-in-one, high-performance storage appliance enables faster access to content while allowing more footage to stream from more tape drives simultaneously

Multiple users work on concurrent workflows simultaneously without performance bottlenecks